Monday, August 7, 2017

BANANA REPUBLICANISM

My web traffic has been flagging a bit as of late, a fact easily attributed to the fact that I haven’t been posting as much lately. I’ll not apologize for it; my life as of late has been, if not a total mess, then a Force 5clusterfuck. Bandwidth is limited; spoons are in short supply. Yet he persisted, enough to realize that the occasional peaks on a flattened EKG mean something, especially when they correspond to postsabout the same subject.

I’m glad to know I’m not alone in my thinking that there’s every possibility of President* Trump declaring as an independent in 2020, and building a voting coalition large enough that could finally, formally split the Republican Party in two. It’s unprecedented, but not illegal; and since when has The Donald ever given a shit about protocol?

Whatever you may think about the extinction-level dumbfuckery taking place in the White House at the moment, one thing is for certain: Trump is giving the people exactly what they want, with the “people” being the roughly 63 million paranoid, racist meatheads and theocratic zealots who voted for him.

And what do they want, he asks rhetorically?

Legitimacy. Validation. Redemption. A chance to stick it to a “gubmint” they feel took away everything they ever loved, and gave it to undeserving black and brown poor people. And boy, have they ever done just that.

I know it’s too soon to tell, even though it sure as hell doesn’t feel like it. But there’s no way Trump is going to quit, and there’s no way the Republicans will either impeach or 25A the guy, short of him diddling Ivanka in the Rose Garden on a YouTube live stream. Like it or not, he’s here to stay, and he may not be “your” president*, but he sure is theirs. And they’re ready, willing, and able to follow him right down the slippery slope into authoritarian, fascist rule with hardly a second thought.

In fact, it’s all they’ve ever wanted. And this is the way it’s always gone, with the only difference the United States doing it to everyone else, and not the other way around. Time and investigation will undoubtedly reveal what every instinct screamingly points to: the president* is a puppet of Russian oil and real estate interests, with Vladimir Putin pulling the strings. If Milton Friedman were alive, you wouldn’t be able to pull his dick out of his hand over the whole thing.

We’re transforming into a banana republic in real time, and the only people who have any real chance of stopping it – the Democratic Party – still can’t seem to agree over how to settle the check from the 2016 primary. Meanwhile, every last toady and footstool of the mainstream press is frantically trying to pretend that this is just “business as usual,” and shove the whole thing down the Memory Hole as fast as humanly possible on behalf of their sponsors and shareholders. The conditions for a massive Republican defection have never been so ripe. Never have such tiny hands held such a great responsibility.

A lot can happen between then and now, certainly. But cults of personality don’t survive by playing nice with apostates, and without unseating a colossal number of Trump’s acolytes in the legislature during the 2018 mid-terms (preferably with staunch progressive leaders), the Republican Party stands little chance of remaining intact beyond 2020. Regardless of whomever decides to peel off at that point, I can tell you one thing: they won’t be wearing tricorne hats. Good thing for them that Fred Perry never goes out of style.